TSMC has already shrunken their die to 7nm. Intel can't keep up anymore. AMD wins this generation.
> Since 2009, however, "node" has become a commercial name for marketing purposes that indicates new generations of process technologies, without any relation to gate length, metal pitch or gate pitch. For example, GlobalFoundries' 7 nm process is similar to Intel's 10 nm process, thus the conventional notion of a process node has become blurred. TSMC and Samsung's 10 nm processes are somewhere between Intel's 14 nm and 10 nm processes in transistor density.
Intel's higher clocks are its only remaining strength through which it can overcome the lower IPC just barely.
Why would they do that? Intel didn't need to knock it out of the park, but they'd make more money doing yet another incremental improvement on 10nm just to get all the upgrade money. And to add in those laptop improvement features (wifi 6, integrated thunderbolt 3).
I'd understand them holding back large IPC improvements just to trickle it out, but holding back 10nm entirely doesn't make sense. Especially since it'd let them do even higher core count Xeon chips which make stupid huge profit.
> AMD beats on IPC, intel suddenly fixes their garbage?
Except AMD has beaten Intel on IPC and yet Intel has still not been able to fix their garbage. So much so they're doing yet another 14nm line of laptop SKUs (Comet Lake)